How is the campaign?

I'm in the minority of players who play the campaign in CoD games and I always decide to buy them on the basis of the single player alone, as I dab around multiplayer for 10 or 20 hours and then forget about it, but I like to get back to the best heavily scripted, but undoubtedly awesome moments. I must say I adored the last two "sci-fi" CoD stories, I was especially surprised by the tone of Infinite Warfare which doesn't get the praise it deserves.

Previous World War II campaigns in CoD were nothing special - World at War tried a few neat things (and even branched the story a bit in some spots), but the overall experience was not as jaw-dropping after seeing the things done in modern Warfares. So, how's the newest iteration fo World War II campaign? I'm sure some of you already finished it, so I'm curious what are your impressions. Is it generic, with all the old tropes and straightforward clones of scenes from Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers? or is there a hidden depth and some genuine emotion in the story, like in Infinite Warfare? Is it worth buying for the campaign? I'll probably wait for the discount anyway, but I'm really interested in the overall impressions.

I've been enjoying the campaign (am 4 missions in). I can't deny that it is inspired by the likes of Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan; but the whole thing has a level of polish that makes it feel like they really paid attention to the campaign. I'm enjoying it more than the last COD campaigns I've played (BLOPS1 and MW2)

@oursin_360: GameSpot seems to really like it so I guess it’s a different strokes for different folks sort of situation. Also with the sheer amount of movies and tv shows based on that time period I think it’s nearly impossible to make an interesting campaign that doesn’t inadvertently draw comparisons. Well unless you make a rocking story about the clerks typing up action reports back at the barracks.

I am not one to buy it for the campaign, but I only play Call of Duty for the campaign (and have played them all). Thankfully, my brother buys them or I help with half. I don't think I'll start playing the campaign tonight though, I just got Wolfenstein and am trying to go through that. Reading reviews, it seems many like the more mature WWII take. That said, I heard it's a little less Hollywood action movie-like.

@xeiphyer: I’m fully with you - Infinite Warfare had an awesome campaign with some pretty amazing moments in it. They really captured what naval warfare would be like in space in the most awesome way. It’s a shame that was the game everyone complained about as being “too sci fi” or whatever.

I enjoyed it but there are parts they really fluff up. There's a vehicle section in the final third which, on paper, should be cool as fuck. Unfortunately, it winds up being a complete calamity. Familiar is the right way to feel about this. It's focused towards a squad of GI's so the global sense of the conflict gets lost in the shuffle. There are some cool interludes but the epilogue feels like a complete bottlejob.

I enjoyed it but there are parts they really fluff up. There's a vehicle section in the final third which, on paper, should be cool as fuck. Unfortunately, it winds up being a complete calamity. Familiar is the right way to feel about this. It's focused towards a squad of GI's so the global sense of the conflict gets lost in the shuffle. There are some cool interludes but the epilogue feels like a complete bottlejob.

The more I think about it the more I wonder what a potential developer could do to make the WWII conflict "fresh" for the player. What story could be told? There is always the possibility of them telling the tale of a reluctant German soldier being indentured into the army and then forced to fight a war he does not support, as in real life there were plenty of German men conscripted into the army under threat of being sent to internment camps or even death. But is that an interesting story if the only moral way out of it is to have the main character defect somehow? You certainly don't want to tell any story from the side of the Russians. So I honestly don't know whats left. Then again I'm no historian, maybe there are some great tales out there, the problem is adapting them into interesting gameplay, as we all know when all is said and done a good 90% of gameplay in even the best story driven titles like The Last of Us is about putting the crosshair over the "bad guy" and pressing the right trigger until you get to the next story beat.

@humanity: Why don't you want to tell the Russian side? The Russia sections were the most dramatic and harrowing parts of CoD 1 and 2. The Russian perspective is also vital in illustrating how the war ended, as it was the Russians who took Berlin and forced the nazi surrender.

And they did it whilst being skint. Their greatest resource was conscription and raw, disposable numbers. The Brits were fighting Italians across Africa whilst home was being bombed to oblivion. France surrendered because it was the only thing they thought could save them. Same could be said for the Dutch. You've got the German perspective where some are indoctrinated, bitter at the aftermath of WWI or just joined up because their doorstep was under fire. You don't hear talk about collaborators in these games. You don't get the human complications of war.

Not to mention Japan's opportunist attempt fight in the Pacific despite being massively, massively outmatched. There's stories to tell. Instead we get Normandy again and a holocaust cameo that a textbook would detail in more brutality than this. It's kinda why I wish Battlefield 1 was a bit more on the nose. The Great War was fucking awful and nobody knew what they were in for.

@impartialgecko: A lot of the evil done by German soldiers was done under orders from higher ups. The Russians on the other, on their way to fight the incoming nazi forces, raped and pillaged everything in their path. There were a lot of terrible things that Russians did on the way to fight the "good fight" against the Germans, not to mention all the horrible things they were actively part of after the end of the war. There are mass graves from illegal executions of Poles being dug up to this day. Plenty of innocent people conscripted into the army on that side as well of course, with the added horror of not even being properly equipped to deal with the incoming threat, but I personally find the Russian front entirely unsympathetic in the long run.

Also while the things mentioned above are interested parts of WWII, how many of them would make interesting 8 hour long campaigns? France surrendering and then wining and dining the German forces in their brothels throughout the war is not an especially exciting topic. The underground resistence forces are interesting, but WWII is characterized as a global event. Similarly Britain getting bombed with V2 rockets would not make for an especially thrilling ride as you wait for sirens to sound and hide in bunkers until the war was over. The pacific campaign has potential to be an interesting story, especially since that whole theater carried its own subset of horrors to go along with it.

I enjoyed the campaign for what it was, I just wish it was something a little less familiar. Not the retelling of an American soilder in 44 - 45. Perhaps the Blitzkrieg of early France or the African Desert theatre, or the road to Rome or the infinite tales that could be told from the Easten Front. I really really would LOVE to play video game from the Axis perspective.

Call of Duty 3 had a Polish section if I recall correctly. There's no major theatre which they haven't visited at this point besides maybe early France (and a Chinese-Japanese theatre they probably don't want to touch).

But still, retelling the same American story is quite a drag in my opinion. I thought maybe the fact that it's a modernized version of an older game would help, but I played two levels and have zero desire to return to it. It still feels like an old game to me. For comparison, I played through the Infinite Warfare campaign in like 1-2 sittings.

I enjoyed the campaign for what it was, I just wish it was something a little less familiar. Not the retelling of an American soilder in 44 - 45. Perhaps the Blitzkrieg of early France or the African Desert theatre, or the road to Rome or the infinite tales that could be told from the Easten Front. I really really would LOVE to play video game from the Axis perspective.

Where does an Axis perspective game go beyond just being generally unpleasant..?

@efesell: it could go literally anywhere. For example perhaps it's a similar tale to CoD WW2 where the player character has a wife at home he's desperate to get home to and there are cut scenes / flashbacks to their home life and it's a tale of survival or perhaps you're s member of the SS defending Hitler to the last and in the end the player character dies. I don't get what you mean by where does it go? We all know the history of how the war plays out, but there are millions of personal story's that could be told within it.

@frodobaggins: I get what you're saying here, but holy heck do I not want a game with a sympathetic Nazi character in 2017. In 2015 I might have been interested in that, but these days? Nope nope nope nope nope.

The African theater fighting against Rommel could be interesting (though it has been done.)

It would also have been interesting to play as one of the peripheral commonwealth allies, like an Australian fighting to defend Greece from the Nazis. A lot of smaller countries have invested a lot in relatively small involvement in World War II, and focusing on one of those smaller theaters could be cool.

Yeah I understand that there are definitely stories you could tell but the idea of embodying them is pretty distasteful.

These days when I hear someone wants to play a game as a Nazi I just hope that it's out of some desire for "complicated" stories or just novelty, and not indicative of something much darker.

Given what happened in Poland this weekend I feel like we could all use a long break from stories that treat Nazis as sympathetic.

You could probably tell a story of one of an invaded countries conscripted soldiers. I think I remember reading of some Polish troops at a bunker during the Normandy invasion and surrendering without fighting when allied troops came up, because there weren't any German troops with them. But, yeah, playing as an actual Nazi? Nah, I'm good.

I'd preferably like to see a North African campaign or something, like Operation Torch, then Husky (Sicily) into Avalanche (Italy)? China could also be interesting. World At War did both the Russian Front and Pacific stuff, though I could revisit those, and maybe something from an ANZAC point of view too.

Or maybe something in the Blitz, with the retreat from Dunkirk. Or the Battle of Britain, or commando raids. Something a little different than post-Normandy landings Western Europe. Civilian / resistance stuff could be interesting.

I wish CoD could split SP and MP. I would buy a $30 campaign. I usually wait for sales if they ever happen.

@humanity: Bar perhaps the victims of the initial Nazi aggression (France, Poland, Finland, Czech Republic etc), there are no actors on the Allied side that are innocent of war crimes. The UK turned multiple German cities into infernos which were orders of magnitude more deadly towards civilians than the Blitz. The US committed heinous war crimes as part of its operations in the Pacific and through the OSS (which became the torture factory we now know as the CIA) and dropped two weapons of mass destruction on civilian cities to demonstrate their destructive power to the ascendant Soviet union.

If you want to make a bunch of hour-long vignettes about the savage Finnish resistance to both the Nazis and the Russians and the Polish resistance, then I am completely down. But saying the Russian perspective is invalid because the Soviets committed war crimes is a) disingenuous, considering that you also said nazi soldiers were not 100% culpable for the decisions by the superiors despite the fact that the majority of them voted for a white supremacist regime and thus condoned violent bigotry and b) whitewashes the very real abuses committed by the Allies in retaliation and to project power in anticipation of future conflicts. I find it pretty hard to agree with your position that the Russian perspective does not deserve to be shown because it is fundamentally unsympathetic when we've had two decades of playing through the US perspective, a country that interned Japanese americans in concentration camps, dropped nuclear bombs on civilian cities and explicitly used the war for profiteering.

Are these abuses identical in their awfulness? Probably not. But it's interesting how the Russian army's abuses were apparently all individually evil acts perpetrated by a meglomaniacal state while the systematic mass killing of civilians by the Allies was all in service of the noble goal of the end of the war. Either you show all of it or you're writing a hagiography, not history.

A lot of the evil done by German soldiers was done under orders from higher ups.

I literally rubbed my eyes and leaned in towards my monitor to see if you had actually posted this sentence. I still have trouble believing you typed this out and posted it. And I just realized my mouth has been hanging open the entire time I was typing this reply. These are – truly – dark days.

Only got six levels in before I quit. It was an absolute bore to me, and it's the only COD I didn't find at least interesting enough to finish since three. I may still finish it, but it'll be after I play all the other games I want to play this year. The issue with this game as far as I've experienced (which is when you finish up the level where you go in as a French woman incognito), it's just shoot dudes here, run to next area, shoot dudes there with little character or emotional weight to it. It's also just super predictable and cliche. The shooting is adequate. It also feels weird how they deliberately went back to first COD game design. It's not a big issue, but it feels like intentional archaicness, which is just a weird choice. There's a subtle automatic lean function which probably won't get much use. I'll have to finish it, and maybe play it on Veteran to see if I enjoy it any more than I did. Like I said in a previous post, I am not a multiplayer game player, but playing it with my brothers I had a lot more fun in that mode, including the zombie mode which I never touch.

I don't think the problem is which perspective gets more screen time. Playing as any of the Axis isn't really that compelling or sympathetic to me because most of it was just "We followed our orders without question". The Soviet campaigns were interesting, but they were heavily stylized or influenced from movies that choose not to show certain aspects, just as much as the American campaigns choose not to show the fire bombings of Dresden or Japanese cities where men, women, and children were burned indiscriminately to demoralize the population.

It's the type of stories that they want to tell and most them come up short of just being a cheap mixed bag of WWII scenes from any movie that involves the European front. There's still lots to tell of the American side that we rarely see. I'd like to see a campaign focus primarily in Africa and Italy, mostly because the U.S. sucked ass at first during their debut to WWII. So seeing them learn how to deal with what were new tactics and threats would be interesting to see, plus I think consumers are ready for a change of scenery if Battlefield 1 was any indication.

@whitegreyblack: Not quite sure what is that shocking about stating that there were soldiers conscripted into the army and forced under orders to do things they didn’t think were right but feared the alternative? It’s not like I’m saying the entire German army was comprised of saints that didn’t know any better.

Campaign wasn't bad, but it did feel extremely short. I did my first play through on Veteran and blew right through the game. Characters were all interesting, but honestly I'm just not a fan of the WW2 setting. Just bores me. Decent story, but nowhere close to being as goid as Infinite Warfare in my opinion.

@humanity: The idea of conscripted soldiers was not what I was commenting on, though. It was your statement that was on its own of "A lot of the evil done by German soldiers was done under orders from higher ups."

Listen, I'm sorry I brought it up and don't want to make a big thing of it; your statement that I reacted to just really kinda shocked me, when taken on its own.

It is exactly what it promises and overall I enjoyed it as a 6 hour run and gun. I think the ending was a little bit silly but if you go in looking for a simple fps with a knock off band of brother story that you don't need to think much about its fun. It's almost all on foot shooter stuff with only small portions on a plan or tank and none of it feels good. There is also a single storyline/stealth based level that I actually kinda found refreshing for a COD game

I'm not great a shooters so I put it on a low difficulty but even on higher ones don't expect some huge challenge I don't think .

The only issue is I found it taking away control a bit to much. There is a scene where they make you walk to a certain point just for an explosion to go off on you which is always kinda frustrating .

I got it for 50 bucks on amazon and traded it in for that same price so its hard for me to complain much. It should also be noted I only buy these games once every few years so WW2 setting is much more fresh to me